MarkMonitor has released a new "brandjacking index", the first quarterly report that measures the impact of online highjacking of company brands. The index investigates trends for cyber attacks such as phishing, cyber-squatting, false association, pay-per-click fraud, domain kiting, objectionable content, and unauthorized sales channels.

There are lots of ways that bad guys can take your brand and undermine it. The index tracks the top 25 brands based on the top 100 brands list tracked by Interbrand. The company scans billions of web pages and processes 16 million phishing emails daily. Here are some results from its survey in March.

Each weekly sample shows there are 300,000 incidents of abuse, with cybersquatting accounting for 275,000 of those. The bad guys often syphon traffic from legitimate sites in an effort to defraud advertisers. Phishing incidents were up 104 percent in the first quarter of 2007 versus 2006. Phishing attacks against financial institutions represent 41 percent of all phishing.